so in 1976 i moved to the bay area, living in oakland in the east bay -- the storefront i ended up renting on macarthur blvd was pretty much equidistant between the headquarters of the black panthers and the hell's angels --so one day i was working on a process poem to be a score for a performance -- and the process was that i was translating the original words of the poem into some words from their definitions in the oxford english dictionary -- for example> original word = extra -- replaced by definition = on the outsideand so i looked up context and BAM! there it was> the weaving together of languageso i immediately stopped working on that piece and made the first context - using some daisy-wheel printing paper i'd gotten a box of out of a dumpster in downtown san franciso which was still pretty rare then --- so rather than overlaying the strips of the pages i had cut up i began to weave them on both the horizontal and vertical planesso i continued to produce CONTEXTS periodically until around 1984due to the transient circumstances of my life none of the original work from this period existshowever 1 polaroid of the original piece, a kodak of a piece from 1977, and a xerox of a photo of the largest context i ever produced dofrom left to right thenthe original, a black on black piece, JAEHIOQUV 22'x4' context woven [from those letters] for the visuo-sonic poemetries show with m.s.bell at la mamelle august 1977

in the meantime i continued weaving contexts, and also applied that name as well to works using just overlayingso in 1981 subterranean published a package of a 7" 45 record of sound poetry and 12 visual poems by s.weisserfrom left > right: the cover, a printed example, and then 2 examples of the original, which were laminated rather than scotch tapedand note that the source material was a box of old mimeographs of elementary school students writing assignments that i found in the barn at the house i lived in in winnetka california from 1972-1974

and here are the last contexts from my amsterdam period, produced in 1982the first two images are a piece [and a detail] that still exists and is on a wall in the peckham house, the third image is a xerox from the catalog of a show the piece was created for at joseph semma's stichting makkom in amsterdam, the fourth image was the piece made from the remainders of the makkom piece